Five hundred sixty four square kilometers. That's all that's left of the world.

Within the walls that confine this space, approximately six million three hundred thousand people make their home, according to the last census.

And beyond that wall, there is – nothing. Only the Wastelands. The charred remains of the Old World. A world that has ended in the Last World War, named after the fact that it would be the last one humanity would ever fight. Since then, not enough of us are left to fight another one, and not enough of the world is left to be worth fighting over.

Every child of Pharos grows up knowing these facts: There is the city, the wall, and the outside. The average citizen does not care about the world outside the wall. The wall is the frame of reference for our world - here we are, safe on the inside. What is outside is irrelevant, because we are not there and it is not here. The wall itself is insurmountable, imperishable, its existence immutable like a law of nature. It has been standing here over a century, and it will continue to stand for centuries to come, keeping everything where it belongs: the outside out and us inside and safe.

If it wasn't for the occasional reconnaissance footage from drones and robots that roam the desolate ruins of the Old World one might think the world outside the wall could have ceased to exist completely. For most other people, it might as well have. But not for the Keres - the scavenger pilots who brave the dangers of the wastes to retrieve valuable resources. Yet even they don't set foot outside the city. Not really, anyway. The scavenging units are AI-controlled for most of their tasks, and only the most delicate missions with unforeseeable parameters require a human pilot at all. And then, all the Keres do is to take remote control via a simulation rig.

When I was a child, I had this naïve and romanticized dream of one day seeing the Old World with my own eyes. To me, it is a wild and dangerous place shrouded in mystery. Perilous. Uncharted. Exciting. It's why I wanted to become a Ker so badly. And it is why I was somewhat disappointed when I grew up and realized that technically, not just did the Keres not really walk the wastes, they didn't even really see the Old World, but rather an image, recorded in real time, and transmitted via quantum entanglement communication. And so the most important lesson was learned early on: What we're seeing is not the world out there, it is an image of the world out there. It reminded me of that Old World painting with the pipe: Ceci n'est pas une pipe. It's not a pipe, it's an image of a pipe. And it made me wonder.

No one alive today has set foot outside these walls, nobody has seen the real Wastelands. Only images. Videos. Photographs. Virtual environments. As a cadet, I have seen simulated environments based on the Wastelands in countless training missions - modeled after the real outside world in great detail, but not 'real'. These simulations are just as beautiful and detailed as reality, and if it wasn't for the interfaces hovering within your field of view, it would be hard to tell you're in a simulation at all. So how to tell the difference between virtual experience, remote-controlling an actual suit, and simulated experience, at all? Does it even make any difference?

Let's look at it like this – if we knew nothing but images of pipes all our lives, and then, one day, were to be shown a real pipe, would we understand, would we recognize the difference? Or would we just say, "Oh sure, that's a pipe."

Yet if we knew real pipes all our lives, if we touched them and used them on a regular basis, and then were shown a picture of a pipe one day, would we not say, "That's not a pipe. I cannot hold it. I cannot smoke it. It is just a picture of a pipe."

So what's it really like outside those walls? What would it be like to feel the sand of the deserts under my feet, to brush my hand against the sun-basked concrete rubble, and to breathe the centuries-old dust in the air of those old ruins?